Complete manual/284/en

A bot (shorted from ‘robot’) is a piece of software that runs an automated task online, performing tasks much faster than humans can. There are many different types of and uses for bots. Spambots are used to harvest email addresses and contact information online. There are also 1,800 ‘approved’ bots in the English language section of Wikipedia that help semi-automate the routine editing of Wikipedia pages. Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, which are deployed in order to prevent access to a website or platform for a given amount of time, are another example of what bots can do (this time as a collection of bots—also known as a ‘botnet’—running on thousands of computers worldwide are ‘turned on’ to target a given page by a person or organization controlling the botnet).